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From the Editors

First, an erratum: last week’s Nass incorrectly attributed the Weekend Page to Rebecca Gold. The piece was in fact written by Zeb Blackwell—all credit where credit is due. As a reminder, if you ever see an error in your Nassau Weekly, please email submissions@beta.beta.beta.nassauweekly.com. We’ll print a retraction, punish the offending parties, and then say our editorial penance.

Without further ado: it’s come to our attention, dear fellow-students, that some Princeton University Public Safety (PUPS) officers have petitioned the administration for the right to carry firearms (cf. the cover of The Daily Princetonian, 28 Mar. 2008). We can’t count the number of times we’ve seen proctors (as they used to be known) skidding dangerously across campus in their souped-up Impalas, making occasionally off-color remarks to ladies heading back from The Street, getting coffee at the Wa—in short, demonstrating precisely the kind of prudence and moderation we look for in the Law Embodied.

So let’s give these guys some friggin’ guns already!

We’re going to level with you here: scary stuff is happening in the world. Princeton is an Open University on an Open Campus—and we live in an Open Country. When someone threatens our great nation, or hints that he may at some later time threaten our great nation—hell, if someone doesn’t mind his Ps and Qs and gets a little liquored up one night and says, ‘You know, that nation America acts all tough, but I’m not so sure myself, you know, about that America…’—what do we do? We batten down the hatches, throw some bad-looking guys (and girls, but mostly guys) in jail, then require double flag-pledging, seven days a week.

That’s how it should be at Princeton.

Everyone talks a mean streak about China. Human rights this, kicking-all-the-homeless-out-of-Beijing that. But let’s examine the specifics. Guns are, for the most part, illegal in the PRC. Protesters don’t have them—liberals, intellectuals, and liberal-intellectuals most certainly don’t. But the MP does.

The result? That’s right—no riots (that are televised), no pesky liberation movements (except over many hundreds of thousands of square miles in Tibet), and no people standing in front of tanks in the center square of the capital city. Not ever.

If it works in China, it can damn well work in our little hermetically-sealed pseudo-town.

Think about it. If we arm all the proctors and submit ourselves to the University’s stringently-enforced No Gun Policy for students and faculty, we can achieve Chinese-style Social Order—and fast. We don’t know about you all, but we love tranquility. Asphyxiating tranquility. With a hint of intimidation.

The situation is simple, the remedy dispositive. Arm our men (and women, but mostly men) in blue. Just like that, an entire group of thirty- and fortysomethings—whose salaries our families pay and whose weekends are spent breaking up our parties—will be able to silence us merely by reaching for their holsters. Think of the time we’ll save! We don’t have to argue or defend ourselves our anything.

Consider Natural Law—our rights to free speech, to free exercise of religion, to peaceful assembly, and to utterly unconstrained ownership of vastly-overpowered, semiautomatic, and easily-concealed weapons. And pistols—our natural right to pistols.

Except not for students. Only for the people whom the students must obey.

Anyway, you get the picture. Constitution blah blah, Second Amendment blah blah blah, fear fear fear. There is terrorism in this world. And all terrorists and sociopaths want to kill all of us, always, especially in precept. Otherwise, why would we be fighting hugely-expensive wars all the time? Logic, people.

‘Let the [proctors] [have] [guns]!’ as Marie Antoinette once said. Enough of this griping. Just hand ‘em out.

And in the meantime, let’s hope the administration doesn’t catch wind of any real Princeton problems.*